A large percentage of dog owners have more than one dog. Additionally, professional dog walkers, trainers and handlers often walk multiple dogs simultaneously in order to optimize their use of time. Unfortunately, having an individual, full length regular walking leash for each dog greatly increases the likelihood that the leashes will become entangled, potentially causing the person walking the animals to lose control of them. A need exists for a device which can be used to safely tether multiple dogs together on a single leash.
Dog leashes which allow the owner to keep multiple dogs on leash and walk them using a single hand-held device are well known in the prior art. Prominent among the short-comings of such devices is the absence of a feedback mechanism between the dogs. Lacking such feedback, the animals run the risk of not only tangling their various leashes but also tripping against, and even over, one another.
Also known in the prior art is a device for tethering just two dogs together in which a pair of leashes are coupled in such a way that they form a bundle that helps to maintain spacing between the tethered dogs. Nevertheless, with the latter device, whether it is of a fixed length or of a very stretchable type, one finds that the dogs' nature often drives them to pull to the full extent of their respective leashes. Indeed, such a coupling actually exacerbates the two dogs' natural tendencies to pull against each other.
Pulling hard away from each other, the dogs can quickly spread themselves too far apart for the person walking them to maintain control, especially when the distance separating the animals is greater than the width of the walkway. More-over, the applicant's experience has been that excessive side-ways pulling away from one another on the part of a pair of tethered dogs leads to increased paw pad wear and tearing. This result is, of course, counterproductive from the perspective of those who might otherwise employ the bundle or a like two leash coupling device in order to carry out a more intense-than-walking exercise regiment one, for example, in which the two dogs, when tethered alongside of a bicyclist, are encouraged to run fast, frequently, and/or over long distances.
Not surprisingly, related problems stemming from this natural tendency of dogs to pull on a leash to its full extent show up even in the case of a single tethered animal—including one that is trying its best to follow a bicyclist's lead but is tethered to the bicycle by a flexible strap. As taught by Leon in U.S. Pat. No. 8,544,420, it is only by pulling on the strap in an attempt to eliminate any slackness in it that the dog, in such a situation, can gain, through direct physical contact, an accurate sense of the direction in which the bicyclist wishes to head.
Realizing that one way to get dogs to walk or run well when tethered together is to reward them for correct positioning, the applicant then analyzed his own dogs' behavior after first testing them to determine just how they would respond, depending upon their positions and spacing relative to each other, when two of them were run at the same time along the side(s) of a bicycle to which they were individually tethered by a dog leash. (The dog leashes employed in this testing are among those taught by Leon in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,013,840 and 8,544,420.) The applicant's findings were that the dogs enjoyed being close together—specifically, running side by side rather than along separate sides of the bicycle—provided they were kept just far enough apart to keep them from tripping on each other. More-over, he found that by so running the dogs side by side and in close enough proximity that each partner dog was well aware of what the other dog was doing, the dogs could travel much faster and farther alongside of the bicyclist than when such awareness was lacking.